Project : Mini Me

This the main information page of the summer 2011 project called "Mini me". "Mini me" is a working scale model of our 2011 robot, it doesn't have a manipulator arm, it only has the swerve drive system. The intent of the model is to provide the coders a system to test out their code. The model will have an Arduino Mega with a motor shield to control the four swerve drives and the four drive motors. PWM values for the eight motors will be communicated via bluetooth frfom a PC. The PC will serve as the cRIO and user interface i.e. xbox controller, joystick. The PC will host the Java development code.

Material:
1 - Vinyl Trim cut to length
8 - 1.5" Brass wood screws
1- Makerbeam Kit
4- Wheel 42x19mm
4- Hitec HS311 Standard Servo
4- Micro Metal Gearmotor 50:1
1- Mega IO Expansion Shield For Arduino Mega V1.1
1- DFRduino Mega(Arduino Mega Compatible)
1- Adafruit motorshield
1- bluetooth reciever
4- insulated standoffs

The development of "Mini-Me" will probable follow these steps:

Determine the scale based on the maximum speed of the big robot and the maximum speed of the model.
- I would like to have someone come up with a spreadsheet calculate the critical specification of the scale robot
- We need to determine what the best scale factor we should use to model our full size model, in order to determine this we will compare maximum linear speed of the robot verses the potential maximum speed of the scale robot. See discussion topics for more details.
Develop the serial communication protocol
Create the tk/tcl user interface
Write the Arduino code of the model
Build the scale model
Test the robot/serial communication/tk/tcl interface tethered
Add the bluetooth interface
Test the robot/serial communication/tk/tcl interface with bluetooth
Write the Java code to interface the xbox controller
Write the Java code to control the swerve drive